Bright's Passage: A Novel by Josh Ritter Page A

as they pushed past him into the church.
    “Jesus! Would ya look at that!”
    “Jesus my foot! Chaplain was right. Catholics. Nothing here but a bunch of dirty pictures. We oughta—”
    The pealing bells above came back to him now and, turning, he found that he was standing before a small stone archway past which a staircase led upward into the bell tower. As the others argued with one another or else stood silently looking up into the blue, Bright stepped through the archway and began to climb the stairs.

13
     
    Without his mother’s rifle, and with little money left to buy provisions, the winter was very hard. The wind shrieked and the stream froze solid. He melted snow for water in which to boil the dwindling reserves of dried corn and bitter carrots. Rachel had terrible pains and sickness for a while. Her tongue turned a bright red and she ran a fever, but she didn’t miscarry.
    When the temperature dropped so low that the chickens stopped laying eggs, he brought them inside and they lived with the clucking all hours. The goats dug for forage some, but as the snow got deeper all the animals got thinner. He killed the first kid and they ate the thing down to nothing. Rachel’s health made an improvement. He killed another and made a stew with a few potatoes and the last of the carrots. She ate this for a week, and gradually the fever broke and her tongue returned to its normal shade. Now that they were inside the cabin, the hens began laying again. In the mornings there would be eggs in the folds of their blanket, in the bottom of the bucket, in the heel of a boot. She got up often now and would peek out at the horse through the freezing crack between the cabin flap and the door frame.
    The horse was enduring the winter only slightly better than the goats. Its thick coat hung loosely over ribs, which showed asplainly as the bars on an empty prison. Except for the times when Bright would rouse it for his rare trips to town, its breaths came slow and deep, as if it was waiting to be revived by a kiss of spring breeze or the chirp of returning birds. Rachel often asked to bring it into the house, something that Bright forbade explicitly. He returned from Fells Corner once to find that she had led the animal inside their cabin anyhow, throwing their quilt over it and stoking the fire. It had been hell getting the stubborn thing out again, but he relented somewhat after this episode and tied the animal to the leeward side of the cabin, where it would be most out of the wind.
    They ate the last kid in late February, when the world was at its coldest, and by early March he had butchered the billy. By then they had both developed a rank distaste for goat meat, and this last sacrifice to their hunger and the hunger of the unborn child was the worst. When he cooked it, the room had filled with gamy, clinging steam.
    She milked the she-goat every day, though, and somehow, slowly, the world began to get warmer and the slant of the sun began to find their faces when they would leave the cabin and tramp through the melting snow to the hutch where he had resettled the chickens. The horse was moved back from the side of the cabin to its customary spot under the chestnut tree. The she-goat began to get fat again, and Bright suspected that she came down off her perch on top of the hen hutch in the night and foraged, when she could be sure that he would not come out and slaughter her as he had the rest of her family.
    By May, his wife’s belly was big and they were happy. At night he would hold her close and she would tell him wild stories that came from her own mind. She never talked about her father and brothers. It was as if since her rescue they had ceased to exist for her, and if that was so he saw no need to remind her of them or of the awful threats the old man had madeas they turned their backs on him and rode away together. Sometimes he would tell her about the War, but when he did it was always about little things: the